9998: Jackie Robinson Day Not Enough…?

From USA TODAY…

Robinson deserves more than one day

By Chris Lamb

Sunday is Jackie Robinson Day in major league ballparks, where the ballplayer and his legacy will be remembered with tributes and testimonials. All big-league players will wear Robinson’s number 42 on their backs, the only number in sports retired in perpetuity.

It is important to remember that Robinson broke major league baseball’s color line on April 15, 1947. But if we restrict Robinson’s influence to baseball, we do both him and what he accomplished a tremendous disservice. He was arguably the most important civil rights figure, and the integration of baseball the most important civil rights story, in the years immediately after World War II.

When he played his first game for the Dodgers on April 15, 1947, he carried the hopes and dreams of millions of blacks. If Robinson succeeded in baseball, as civil rights leader Roy Wilkins had earlier said, it meant blacks “should have their own rights, should have jobs, decent homes and education, free from insult, and equality of opportunity to achieve.”

Success vs. failure

Never before — and never since — had so much been riding on one athlete. If Robinson succeeded, he succeeded for all blacks. If he failed, he would affirm the belief of many whites at the time that blacks were inferior.

Nobody in sports ever had more at stake and no one ever suffered more. Nobody in baseball ever received such vile abuse from fans and opponents. Opposing pitchers threw at him. Opposing base runners spiked him. He received death threats routinely.

Robinson’s strength in the face of those threats and unspeakable obscenities demonstrated non-violent resistance long before it was practiced in places such as Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery and other Southern cities and towns.

The integration of baseball came years before the civil rights movement had a name and years before the country had heard of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks or Brown v. Board of Education.

Feat transcends baseball

King said that Robinson’s courage in confronting the color line in baseball helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement. “Back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable,” King said, “he underwent the trauma and humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”

Robinson succeeded — and his success cured many Americans of their belief that blacks were inferior and convinced many others that blacks should have the same opportunities as whites.

“As their champion, Robinson had taken their hopes into the arena of baseball and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams,” Arnold Rampersad wrote in his biography of Robinson. “Neither blacks nor whites would be quite the same thereafter in America.”

If Jim Crow seems distant today, it is because of men like Robinson. We need to remember him for what he accomplished inside the white lines of baseball, but we also need to remember him for what he accomplished outside. His life teaches us that progress often depends on individuals willing to sacrifice themselves for something bigger.

Walking into the most hostile of winds for so long took its toll on Robinson. When he died in 1972 of complications from heart disease and diabetes, he was nearly blind and crippled, and his hair was white. He was just 53.

His gravestone reads: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on others’ lives.”

Chris Lamb is a professor of communication at the College of Charleston and the author of Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball.

9986: John Derbyshire’s Demons.

Recent events like the Trayvon Martin shooting have inspired Black parents nationwide to have The Talk with their children. This in turn prompted John Derbyshire to write The Talk: Nonblack Version at Taki’s Magazine. It’s hard to imagine what might have been rattling around Derbyshire’s skull while he typed the perspective, but he clearly is not among the 36% of Americans (FYI, Derbyshire is British-American) who would be most hurt over being labeled a racist. One must also question the sanity of the editors at Taki’s Magazine for their questionable judgment. The publication’s site boasts:

We at Taki’s Magazine take our politics like we take life—lightly. We believe political labels such as conservative and liberal are as outdated as flared trousers and nazis. Ideology is a false god, a secular religion that seeks vainly to create a paradise on Earth. Our only ideology is to be against the junk culture foisted upon us and mirages of a new world order. Think of us what you will, but read us. Our writers are never boring.

Ignorance masquerading as the intelligentsia is never impressive. Promoting hate for the sake of visitor hits is pathetic.

9981: Talking The Talk.

From The Los Angeles Times…

For black parents in Pasadena, shootings give fresh relevance to ‘The Talk’

The fatal shootings of Kendrec McDade in Pasadena and a black teen in Florida renew the painful generations-old discussion about the need to swallow one’s anger and pride when dealing with the police.

By Christopher Goffard and Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times

When Martin A. Gordon talks to his 19-year-old son about the history of race relations in America, he invokes the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King Jr.and the watershed moments of the civil rights era. It’s a story of hard-won rights that fills the ‘60s-era activist with pride.

Then the conversation turns urgently personal, survival its theme: On the wrong street, at the wrong time of day, he tells his son, pride might be his undoing. “I know my son can be a moment away from being killed if he acts the wrong way, if he’s arrogant,” Gordon said. “He started to learn about this as a child.”

Gordon was speaking in a Pasadena church, blocks from where an unarmed black college student, Kendrec McDade, was fatally shot March 24 by two white police officers pursuing two men who they mistakenly believed were armed robbers. Police say the incident began when the 19-year-old McDade and a friend stole a backpack from a car, and the owner lied to police, telling them the thieves were armed.

The incident, which remains under investigation, followed the controversial shooting death of an unarmed black teen in Florida by a neighborhood watch leader. For many black parents, the shootings have given fresh relevance to a painful generations-old conversation. “The Talk,” some call it.

“Certain things are a reality for him — he needed to understand that early on,” Jim Collins, a longtime Pasadena resident, recalled of his conversation with his son. “The Talk is because they have to know what to do and not do.”

Parents say some version of the conversation, ubiquitous in African American life, is necessary regardless of how high they climb on the socioeconomic ladder. It is about learning to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” when a policeman pulls you over, no matter how unjustified the stop seems. It is about keeping your hands on the steering wheel and giving officers no cause for panic. It is about swallowing your anger and pride and coming home alive.

Gordon, an activist with the Pasadena Community Coalition, said he worries when his son stays out late. “If I wake up and he’s not there, I go, ‘Oh, boy,’” Gordon said.

He said he speaks at seminars, instructing black youths about how to handle themselves around police. He wants them to know their rights, but also to be respectful.

“Just because you asserted your rights doesn’t mean you won’t get your butt kicked,” Gordon said. “You can be dead and no one’s there to speak for your rights. That’s what scares me most.”

Read the full story here.

9902: Oreo, The Cross-Cultural Cookie.

Draftfcb launched a campaign to celebrate Oreo’s 100th birthday. Given the ad agency’s cross-cultural hustle, the ad below is probably targeting Latinos.


Here are MultiCultClassics versions for Black audiences.

9901: The Black365 Knowledge Bowl.

The Los Angeles Times reported on a community effort that will hopefully not draw a copyright infringement complaint from Mickey D’s 365Black.

Black history competition aims to celebrate youths’ academic prowess

The Black365 Knowledge Bowl Competition, a ‘Jeopardy’-style contest in the Antelope Valley, quizzes high school students. The founder grew up with a limited view of paths open to young African Americans.

By Ann M. Simmons, Los Angeles Times

Growing up in the Antelope Valley, Jamaal Brown aspired to be a professional basketball player.

“I thought African Americans could only be athletes, gang members, entertainers and drug dealers,” he said, referring to media stereotypes that convinced him his career paths were limited.

But when minor surgery for a heart condition foiled his pro ball ambitions, Brown turned to books and, in doing so, devoured information about black history. Valedictorian for his Lancaster High School class, he won a scholarship to Cal State Long Beach, one of eight universities that recruited him.

Armed with a degree in business management and information systems, he launched the Black365 Knowledge Bowl Competition last year, a “Jeopardy”-style contest that quizzes high school students on black history.

On Saturday, students from northern Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley High School, Knight High School and SOAR (Students on the Academic Rise) High School and from South L.A.’s Animo Locke II college preparatory charter high school will gather in Palmdale to challenge each other on their knowledge of black history.

“I wanted to do the best that I could do to ensure that no young person grew up as short-sighted as I was,” said Brown, 29, who also created a 365 Days of Black Facts Calendar, which showcases positive accomplishments of people of African descent.

“I wanted to create an institution where our community could celebrate our youth more than just for their athletic prowess ... but for their academic prowess.”

Categories include Famous Quotations, African Flags, Black Inventors, Great African Leaders and Political Prisoners.

A sampling: name the first African nation to gain independence (the answer is Ghana); identify the author of this quote, “You have to be taught to be second class, you’re not born that way” (that would be actress, singer and civil rights activist Lena Horne).

Although black knowledge bowls are not new — historically black colleges, advocacy groups and other institutions have sponsored such annual events — Tony Lawson, Animo Locke’s team coordinator, said Brown’s creation focuses on aspects of the black American experience not typically included in the California school curriculum.

“It forces students to step beyond their normal duties,” said Lawson, who teaches history.

Winners receive a trophy as well as cash to go toward education expenses, Brown said. Rewards for runners-up include medals, mall gift cards and black history books. Sponsors of the bowl — which include the United Christian Fellowship in Palmdale, where the event will be held — made cash donations ranging from $50 to more than $250, according to Brown.

But prizes aren’t important to Jennifer Williams, captain of the SOAR team, winners of the inaugural competition.

“It’s not about the money,” said Williams, 17, who with her teammates spent eight hours each weekend cramming for the quiz and used their 30-minute lunch break twice a week to drill. “For me it’s more about gaining the knowledge.”

Team member Alexis Hithe agreed. “I want to know where I came from,” she said. “And I feel that I can’t get ahead in life if I don’t know my roots, and black history is my roots.”

Both Williams and Hithe said they had saved their $100 winnings from last year.

For Brown, currently a counselor at Antelope Valley Youth Build, a community development program that helps youths from low-income communities, a critical goal of the competition is to promote a positive image of African American young people.

“Our community needs ways in which we can uplift and celebrate our youth,” said Brown.

Jessica Nesbitt, 17, Animo Locke’s team captain, said everyone would go away victorious if they succeeded in showing the community that “black kids are intelligent and talented.”

“Just because we might live next door to gang-bangers, I hope they learn that there’s more to us than that,” she said.

9828: Rev. Meets Rep.

Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Maxine Waters are headlining the 2012 Essence Music Festival? Can’t wait to hear that duet performance.

9817: Blaxploitation History Month.

The New York Daily News presents ‘Blaxploitation’ Stars: Where are they now?

9810: Museums Spotlight Civil Rights.

From The New York Times…

New Museums to Shine a Spotlight on Civil Rights Era

By Kim Severson

ATLANTA — Drive through any state in the Deep South and you will find a monument or a museum dedicated to civil rights.

A visitor can peer into the motel room in Memphis where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was staying when he was shot or stand near the lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where four young men began a sit-in that helped end segregation.

Other institutions are less dramatic, like the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Ga., where Jim Crow-era toilet fixtures are on display alongside folk art.

But now, a second generation of bigger, bolder museums is about to emerge.

Atlanta; Jackson, Miss.; and Charleston, S.C., all have projects in the works. Coupled with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which breaks ground in Washington this week, they represent nearly $750 million worth of plans.

Collectively, they also signal an emerging era of scholarship and interest in the history of both civil rights and African-Americans that is to a younger generation what other major historical events were to their grandparents. “We’re at that stage where the civil rights movement is the new World War II,” said Doug Shipman, the chief executive officer for the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, a $100 million project that is to break ground in Atlanta this summer and open in 2014.

“It’s a move to the next phase of telling this story,” he said.

The collection at the museum, which is to be set on two and half acres of prime downtown real estate donated by Coca-Cola, will include 10,000 documents and artifacts from Dr. King and a series of paintings based on the life of Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, by the artist Benny Andrews, who died in 2006.

Like many of the new museums, the Atlanta center aims higher than the first wave of monuments to the period. It will link the civil rights movement to global human rights, exploring how, for example, Dr. King’s speeches helped fuel the Arab Spring.

Although the momentum for the new museums is strong, the recession has shaved the size and shape of some projects, and raising money can be a challenge.

John Fleming, the director of International African American Museum planned for Charleston and a former president of the Association of African American Museums, points to the United States National Slavery Museum in Fredericksburg, Va. That project, led by former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, was supposed to open on 38 acres in 2004. It recently went into bankruptcy, and people who donated money and artifacts are upset.

Although exactly what went wrong is still being debated, Mr. Fleming said that in part the project aimed too high and did not adjust as the economy softened. Mr. Fleming’s own project began as an $80 million, 70,000-square-foot museum. Now, it is smaller by $30 million and 20,000 square feet.

“Most black museums have difficulty raising funds,” Mr. Fleming said. “Being truthful, I don’t think people in the African-American community have stepped up to the plate in terms of making significant donations to these projects.”

Other directors disagree, saying a generation whose parents or grandparents lived through the 1950s and 1960s are now elected officials and on boards, where they have influence over where cultural dollars are spent.

“The folks who actually participated in the civil rights movement are getting to an age where legacy is important,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, director of the Smithsonian’s African-American museum.

The election of President Obama, Mr. Shipman said, “caps the civil rights era and opens up the next chapter. There is a distance that allows new questions to be asked.”

As with the Holocaust and other historical events that eventually moved from painful reality to memorials and then to museums and academic scholarship, the importance of the civil rights movement gets heightened as the last of the participants begin to die.

“In some ways, it’s very much like the old Civil War veterans passing from the scene. Suddenly, the Civil War became more important,” said Philip G. Freelon, the architect who has designed most of the major civil rights museums in the country, including the projects at the Smithsonian and in Atlanta and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, a long-stalled project that finally secured $20 million from the State Legislature last April after Gov. Haley Barbour spoke in its favor.

The package comes with an additional $18 million to build an adjacent state history museum.

“These museums throughout the South are really a sea change,” said William Ferris, a University of North Carolina folklorist who edited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. “In Mississippi, to see a major civil rights museum is heartening in every sense.”

For some, however, there is concern that the movement to isolate the era in bigger and better museums helps people avoid meaningful conversations about racism that still expresses itself in everything from interactions at a grocery store to the presidential election.

“All of these efforts are important, but we still have not addressed the issue of race in America, and until we do, that hydra is going to keep raising its ugly head,” said Ayisha Cisse-Jeffries, vice president for global affairs and international policy at the African American Islamic Institute.

And then there is the question of attendance. With so many museums with similar themes, are there enough interested visitors?

Directors say the idea is to create a network of institutions that enhance one another rather than detract. And each place intends to have a specific focus. In Charleston, where fund-raising is beginning for a museum dedicated to slavery, visitors will be able to walk the ground where 40 percent of the Africans who would be sold as slaves arrived. The museum in Washington will be the most prominent. An estimated four million visitors are expected each year.

Its vast collection will be more archival, and will include the original “Soul Train” sign, the dress that Rosa Parks wore the day she refused to give up her seat on the bus and the gospel hymn book that belonged to Harriet Tubman.

As with many museums and collections dedicated to African-American history — there are more than 200 — the goal is to use black history as a lens on America.

“It is a new day, and the new day means this isn’t a time to remedy prior omissions,” Mr. Bunch said. “It really is a time to say this is how to understand who we are as Americans.”

9800: Black Icons, Black History.

From The Root…

When Beloved Icons Become Black History

By Madison Gray

The tragic irony of coping with the recent deaths of Whitney, Don and others during Black History Month.

In black culture, we do three rituals differently from other ethnic groups: get married, worship and bury our loved ones.

And in those three, we express ourselves more vociferously than in just about any other aspect of our lives. When we get married, we party hard. When we go to church, we see middle-aged women getting the “holy ghost” and when we hold a funeral, there’s always a chorus of wailing.

Then there are those times we mourn the passing of someone we all know, even if that person didn’t know each of us personally—that “family member,” in the larger sense, who found a way to bring something special into our lives, who connects us all. We become sad and we give condolences, then we slowly heal.

Sometimes, though, we are forced to bury such people more than once in a short period of time. And that has been a theme of the past few weeks in black pop culture. So far this Black History Month, we seem to have buried so many of our famous that it has become difficult to focus on the larger scope of black history.

So far we have mourned the passing of powerful R&B songstress Etta James, Soul Train impresario Don Cornelius, gospel prodigy David Peaston, opera pioneer Camilla Williams and, most recently and tragically, America’s most beloved diva, Whitney Houston.

In the cases of James and Williams, we know that they lived full lives, and it becomes easier to let them go with a tear and a flower. Cornelius lived an equally full life, but the apparent suicide of a man who brought so much joy to us every Saturday is difficult to grasp. Peaston’s death at 54, still young, serves as a reminder that maintaining our health is tantamount.

But losing Houston was the most unexpected of all. If it did not shock all of us, it certainly saddened us to know that her voice is now forever silenced.

And now the losses seem to become too much to bear.

The most difficult thing is that although these are pop-culture figures—simply famous people whom we have come to know over the years through their work—in our psyches they are family members. We have let these folks into our homes like cousins or aunts and uncles who bring gifts from faraway places.

As much as we complain about the lavish, decadent lives of the rich and famous—and in many cases they do warrant harsh criticism—there are those we lose who are like that brother we know was not perfect, but we loved him dearly despite his faults. We will never fully get over his loss. I can’t think of a better example than Michael Jackson.

So although we have to bury another loved one this week, another family member whose voice was the sound track of our youths, there is a lesson in this that echoes in a saying that our parents keep telling us year after year and generation after generation: “Give me my flowers while I can still smell them.”

We’ve heard that said in myriad ways, but the gist is that when we lose someone, we can let their children, their siblings or even their parents know how much we cared for them, but the truth is, the deceased won’t know if we fail to tell them before they are gone. The thing I love about black folks is that through everything, our culture dictates many ways of saying “I love you” to the people about whom we care most.

And in this unexpected season of multiple losses in black pop culture, we can take solace in the fact that, as fans, we managed to tell these people that we did love them. Each of them had to face their own personal challenges, and in some cases the pain was overwhelming, but we had the opportunity to let them know we loved what they did for us.

Now we have to take that lesson and bring it into our own lives: If you have someone about whom you care, don’t hesitate to tell them that you care. Find a way of showing it. We will all one day make that transition. Death is one of the few constants in life. But when we are told by someone, “Thank you for bringing a little joy into my life” while we are still breathing, it makes the inevitable easier to accept.

Madison Gray is a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based writer and Web journalist.

9782: Considering Black Characters.

From The New York Times…

Black Characters in Search of Reality

By Brent Staples

Through most of the 20th century, images of African-Americans in advertising were mainly limited to servants like the pancake-mammy Aunt Jemima and Rastus, the chef on the Cream of Wheat box. Imagine a Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep during the era of the Negro as household retainer and woke up in 2012. He would be struck speechless by billboards and commercials featuring affluent black people advising consumers on pharmaceuticals, real estate, financial services and the virtues of owning expensive cars. This kind of transformation has yet to take hold in the dramatic arts.

Advertisers, who must create the world anew every day, have to keep close tabs on changing social and cultural realities. The industry began to normalize images of black affluence in response to the civil rights revolution, and embraced those images as it became clear that they were good for selling breakfast cereal and mutual funds, too.

The dramatic arts are less nimble, partly because they draw on material that is rarely written by people of color and often firmly rooted in a past that allowed for only a narrow, impoverished view of African-American life. The black middle and upper classes have long fumed that stage and film have rendered them largely invisible — and are hungry for serious works with rounded characterizations of themselves.

This hunger was not satisfied by “The Help,” a movie about maids in the racist, early 1960s South that has been nominated in multiple categories for the Oscar. In addition to its best picture nomination, the film has produced a best actress nomination for the wonderful Viola Davis, who stars as the quietly volcanic Aibileen, and a best supporting actress nod for Octavia Spencer, who plays her voluble friend.

The troubling thing is that the only two black actors in this year’s Oscar competition are cast as domestics, and would probably not have found meaty, starring roles in other films had they passed on “The Help.” This brings to mind the first black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, who received the award in 1940 for her portrayal of the loyal maid in “Gone With the Wind.” When criticized for often playing a mammy on film, Ms. McDaniel famously said she would rather play a maid in the movies than be one.

Black artists are often faced with the problem of having to elevate through sheer skill material that is stereotypical or even racist. The director Diane Paulus and her talented stars, Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis, undertake just such a renovation in the new Broadway production of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” African-Americans have generally disliked this work, the story of a love affair between a crippled beggar and a drug-addicted woman.

Sidney Poitier initially refused the role of Porgy in the 1959 film (calling it “not material complimentary to black people”), but later succumbed to Hollywood pressure. The New Yorker critic Hilton Als, who has praised the revised version, is no fan of the original either. The opera, he writes, is traditionally staged in a way that casts the love affair in the context of a poor black community’s “will to destruction.” There is “no uplift, just sweat, blood, carnality and resignation.”

Some purists have condemned the new version as a betrayal of the creators’ intentions. But the show now fleshes out the lives of the lovers, excavating the humanity of characters long buried beneath early-20th-century preconceptions.

In their vacation homes in Sag Harbor and Martha’s Vineyard, the black upper classes have complained about the white world’s tendency to equate blackness almost exclusively with poverty and deprivation. This grievance was in no way salved by late-20th-century sitcoms like “The Cosby Show” or “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” which were comedies, after all, and could be dismissed as imaginary.

The hunger for textured depictions of black lives found an indulgence this season on Broadway. The Cort Theater in Manhattan was jumping during the two performances I attended of Lydia Diamond’s “Stick Fly.” This family drama is set in the Martha’s Vineyard vacation home of a black neurosurgeon and the blue-blooded wife he met at a “paper bag” party — so named because no African-American darker than the bag was supposed to be admitted.

The play deals interestingly, if melodramatically, with that special class tension that has always existed between the black elites and the less well off, with whom they were often pushed into close proximity by segregation. The playwright makes a passing reference to Jack and Jill, a once quasi-secret black organization, scarcely heard of among whites, whose chapters met mainly at the homes of black elites and served to foster what often became lifelong alliances.

At the performances I saw, the show unfolded with comfortable familiarity and knowing laughter from a largely black audience that was pleased to see itself credibly rendered onstage.

9770: Lowell Thompson, Adman And Author.

Just in time for Black History Month, Lowell Thompson has written a new book, African Americans in Chicago. Pick up your copy via Amazon.com or other booksellers.

9761: Malcolm X Rediscovered.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Student rediscovers lost Malcolm X speech

By David Klepper

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The recording was forgotten, and so, too, was the odd twist of history that brought together Malcolm X and a bespectacled Ivy Leaguer fated to become one of America’s top diplomats.

The audiotape of Malcolm X’s 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn’t stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives.

“No one had listened to this in 50 years,” Burnley told the Associated Press. “There aren’t many recordings of him before 1962. And this is a unique speech — it’s not like others he had given before.”

In the May 11, 1961, speech delivered to a mostly white audience of students and some residents, Malcolm X combines blistering humor and reason to argue that blacks should not look to integrate into white society but instead must forge their own identities and culture.

At the time, Malcolm X, 35, was a loyal supporter of the black separatist movement Nation of Islam, now based in Chicago. He would be assassinated four years later after leaving the group and crafting his own more global, spiritual ideology.

The legacy of slavery and racism, he told the crowd of 800, “has made the 20 million black people in this country a dead people. Dead economically, dead mentally, dead spiritually. Dead morally and otherwise. Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.”

The rediscovery of the speech could be the whole story. But Burnley found the young students in the crowd that night proved to be just as fascinating.

Malcolm X was prompted to come to Brown by an article about the growing Black Muslim movement published in the Brown Daily Herald. The article by Katharine Pierce, a young student at Pembroke College, then the women’s college at Brown, was first written for a religious studies class. It caught the eye of the student paper’s editor, Richard Holbrooke.

Holbrooke would become a leading American diplomat, serving as U.S. Ambassador to Germany soon after that nation’s reunification, ambassador to the United Nations and President Barack Obama’s special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan before his death in 2010 at age 69.

But in 1961, Holbrooke, 20, was eager to use the student newspaper to examine race relations — an unusual interest on an Ivy League campus with only a handful of black students.

Pierce’s article ran in the newspaper’s magazine and made her the first woman whose name was featured on the newspaper’s masthead.

Somehow, the article made its way to Malcolm X. His staff and Holbrooke worked out details of the visit weeks in advance.

Tickets — going for 50 cents apiece — for the Brown speech sold quickly. About 800 people filled the venue meant for 500.

9756: Debunking The Black Suicide Myth.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Time to shatter the black suicide myth

By Clarence Page

The death of Don Cornelius, creator and host of “Soul Train,” brought two conflicting memories to mind: the weekly joy of that iconic program as a defining feature of black American pop culture, and the terrible pain inflicted on the surviving family and friends of those who commit suicide.

Like countless other boomers, I grew up with “Soul Train.” Today, the old clips look like an amusing period piece, especially to our kids or grandkids who wonder how any of us could have thought those “Saturday Night Fever” fashions were cool.

But in the 1970s and beyond, “Soul Train” defined cutting-edge cool. It became the longest-running syndicated show of its type on TV and, as Cornelius said every week, “The hippest trip in the galaxy.”

But the hip trip finally came to an end a few years ago on TV and for Cornelius, amid reports of failing health. Police say he died in his Los Angeles home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

That tragedy has special meaning in the African-American community, which has long nourished a dangerous myth that black people don’t commit suicide.

It is a point of mythical ethnic pride that our ancestors found ways to persevere despite centuries of slavery, struggle and hardship. Black people created the blues, it is often said, because we didn’t have psychotherapists.

Besides, as an old joke goes, we black people don’t kill ourselves because you can’t kill yourself by jumping out of a basement window. We can only wish that were true. Although whites and Native Americans have the highest suicide rates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the black suicide rate has been high enough in recent years to claim one African-American every 4.5 hours.

No group is immune. By gender, non-Hispanic white and Native American men have the highest suicide rates, of about 25 lives per 100,000. That’s more than four times the rate of women in each racial group. It also is more than twice the rate of black and Hispanic men, whose suicide rate of about 11 per 100,000 is five times the rate of black and Hispanic women. Asian-American men have a rate of about 9 per 100,000, slightly more than twice the rate of Asian-American women.

Yet the black suicide myth persists. “As a mental-health advocate, over the years I’ve heard variations of the ‘black people don’t commit suicide’ meme,” wrote Bassey Ikpi on the black-oriented The Root website after Cornelius’ death. “Yesterday the chorus was deafening. People went so far as to create elaborate conspiracy theories rather than accept what could be a simple truth — that Cornelius had taken his own life.”

I share her sense of frustration. I suddenly became an expert because of a personal tragedy, as many Chicagoans know. Back in May 1984, suicide ended the life and career of Leanita McClain, an award-winning Chicago Tribune columnist and ghetto-to-Gold-Coast success story.

She was also my former wife. She killed herself with an overdose of prescribed pills two years after our divorce. Her upward career trajectory, like our marriage, was stopped only by the furies of her relentless depression.

“Happiness is a private club that will not let me enter,” she wrote in her “generic suicide note.”

It is not hard, although it is not pain-free either, for me to imagine that Don Cornelius could have written the same message. Suicides inflict a terrible cruelty on the survivors. Everyone asks “why” and there are no easy answers. I was surprised by how many of my friends came forth to share stories of their own loved ones who had ended their lives or come close to it in their severe depression. I was shocked by how common such illnesses can be, regardless of race or community background.

I also learned about guilt. “People feel guilty if they failed to get help for their lost loved one,” a counselor told me, and they feel guilty if they did get help and the loved one killed him or herself anyway. It is best to seek help. Whether you believe it or not, you have too much to lose.

9750: Riding Soul Train Memories.

From USA TODAY…

‘Soul Train’ laid the rails of a cultural revolution

By Marco R. della Cava and Steve Jones, USA TODAY

Armed with sharp suits and a mesmerizing voice, Don Cornelius set out in 1970 to entertain viewers of Chicago’s WCIU with a song-and-dance TV show called Soul Train. Turns out, America wanted in on the party.

Cornelius, 75, died Wednesday at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said. The music maverick struck financial and cultural gold with Soul Train, whose 35 years on the air made it the longest first-run syndicated show in history, with an effect that crossed generations and races.

“Soul Train gave the black community reason to be proud,” says Kenneth Gamble, half of the fabled songwriting team Gamble & Huff, who wrote the show’s chugging theme song, known as T.S.O.P (The Sound of Philadelphia). “It was so rare at the time to see someone black doing anything like that.”

If Dick Clark’s American Bandstand was Saturday morning’s placid place to play, Soul Train, with its driving music and innovative dancers rooted in the urban scene, was the coolest party you could hope to crash. Its minimalist stage played host to everyone from the Jackson 5 to Elton John.

“That show was the centerpiece of my Saturdays,” says hip-hop artist Terius “The-Dream” Nash, who co-wrote the Beyoncé hit Single Ladies (Put A Ring on It) and performed on the program in 2005. “Don reminded me of my old band teacher. He could look you in the eye and you felt like he knew what you were going to be.”

Soul Train “had a substantial impact and was very much a part of contemporary music history,” says Clive Davis, chief creative officer of Sony Music Worldwide and the record mogul who nurtured the careers of Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston and Dionne Warwick. “His show reached a sizable and devoted audience, and every major artist of the time did it and did it willingly.”

The music industry mourns
News of Cornelius’ death rippled through the entertainment industry and the blogosphere, where fans famous and anonymous alike were eager to pay tribute to a man whose signature sign-off — “We wish you peace, love and soul!” — became as familiar as family.

“Don Cornelius! It’s so shocking and stunning,” Aretha Franklin said in a statement. “A young, progressive brother set the pace and worldwide standard for young aspiring African-American men.”

Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the basketball legend and chairman of Soul Train Holdings, recalled being glued to the television on Saturdays: “Soul Train taught the world to dance” and gave musicians and dancers “the ultimate platform to showcase their talents when no one else would.”

When Arash Shirazi came to the USA from Iran, he watched Soul Train to learn English and wound up going into show business as a booking agent. He tweeted his condolences, adding that the show “opened the door to R&B dance culture. … It shaped my musical tastes and added a visual element to a song.”

Actor Omar Epps thanked the man for “creating a platform which helped uplift me through my childhood,” and rapper MC Hammer wrote: “It meant more to me to perform on #SoulTrain than to win a Grammy … Loved U So Much Don.”

With his smooth, resonant baritone, Cornelius introduced hundreds of stars to the nation’s multicultural TV audience, including James Brown, Jerry Butler, Marvin Gaye, The O’Jays and Barry White. In the background were a colorful menagerie of partiers who influenced dance and fashion and opened a window onto black culture that had received scant media exposure.

“Back then, there was no targeted television and I just had the sense that television shouldn’t be that way,” Cornelius told USA TODAY in a rare interview in 2010, when the show was celebrated with a VH1 documentary. “The primary mission of the show was to provide TV exposure for people who would not get it otherwise. People who didn’t get invited to The Mike Douglas Show, or (Johnny) Carson. There was no ethnic television, just general-market television, which meant mostly white people.”

Soul Train’s role in pushing black culture into the mainstream cannot be underestimated, says Mark Anthony Neal, professor of black popular culture at Duke University.

“Motown had laid down the sonic groundwork, but Don Cornelius let you visualize it,” he says. “Black power was visible on Soul Train. It’s what led to the love affair between black and white culture, and why eventually you started seeing white musicians like Boz Scaggs on Don’s show. That show filled a gap.”

Read the full story here.

9744: Don Cornelius (1936-2012).

From The Los Angeles Times…

‘Soul Train’ creator Don Cornelius dead in apparent suicide

“Soul Train” creator Don Cornelius was found dead at his Sherman Oaks on home Wednesday morning.

Law enforcement sources said police arrived at Cornelius' home around 4 a.m. He apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing.

The sources said there was no sign of foul play, but the Los Angeles Police Department was investigating.

In a 2010 interview with The Times, he said he was excited about a movie project he was developing about “Soul Train.”

“We’ve been in discussions with several people about getting a movie off the ground. It wouldn’t be the ‘Soul Train’ dance show, it would be more of a biographical look at the project,” he said. “It’s going to be about some of the things that really happened on the show.”

According to a Times article, Cornelius’ “Soul Train” became the longest-running first-run nationally syndicated show in television history, bringing African American music and style to the world for 35 years.

Cornelius stopped hosting the show in 1993, and “Soul Train” ceased production in 2006.

9703: Etta James (1938-2012).

From The New York Times…

Etta James Dies at 73; Voice Behind ‘At Last’

By Peter Keepnews

Etta James, whose powerful, versatile and emotionally direct voice could enliven the raunchiest blues as well as the subtlest love songs, most indelibly in her signature hit, “At Last,” died on Friday morning in Riverside, Calif. She was 73.

Her manager, Lupe De Leon, said that the cause was complications of leukemia. Ms. James, who died at Riverside Community Hospital, had been undergoing treatment for some time for a number of conditions, including leukemia and dementia. She also lived in Riverside.

Ms. James was not easy to pigeonhole. She is most often referred to as a rhythm and blues singer, and that is how she made her name in the 1950s with records like “Good Rockin’ Daddy.” She is in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame.

She was also comfortable, and convincing, singing pop standards, as she did in 1961 with “At Last,” which was written in 1941 and originally recorded by Glenn Miller’s orchestra. And among her four Grammy Awards (including a lifetime-achievement honor in 2003) was one for best jazz vocal performance, which she won in 1995 for the album “Mystery Lady: Songs of Billie Holiday.”

Regardless of how she was categorized, she was admired. Expressing a common sentiment, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote in 1990 that she had “one of the great voices in American popular music, with a huge range, a multiplicity of tones and vast reserves of volume.”

For all her accomplishments, Ms. James had an up-and-down career, partly because of changing audience tastes but largely because of drug problems. She developed a heroin habit in the 1960s; after she overcame it in the 1970s, she began using cocaine. She candidly described her struggles with addiction and her many trips to rehab in her autobiography, “Rage to Survive,” written with David Ritz (1995).

Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 1938. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was 14 at the time; her father was long gone, and Ms. James never knew for sure who he was, although she recalled her mother telling her that he was the celebrated pool player Rudolf Wanderone, better known as Minnesota Fats. She was reared by foster parents and moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 12.

She began singing at the St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles at 5 and turned to secular music as a teenager, forming a vocal group with two friends. She was 15 when she made her first record, “Roll With Me Henry,” which set her own lyrics to the tune of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ recent hit “Work With Me Annie.” When some disc jockeys complained that the title was too suggestive, it was changed to “The Wallflower,” although the record itself was not.

“The Wallflower” rose to No. 2 on the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1954. As was often the case in those days with records by black performers, a toned-down version was soon recorded by a white singer and found a wider audience: Georgia Gibbs’s version, with the title and lyric changed to “Dance With Me, Henry,” was a No. 1 pop hit in 1955. (Its success was not entirely bad news for Ms. James. She shared the songwriting royalties with Mr. Ballard and the bandleader and talent scout Johnny Otis, who had arranged for her recording session. Mr. Otis died on Tuesday.)

In 1960 Ms. James was signed by Chess Records, the Chicago label that was home to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and other leading lights of black music. She quickly had a string of hits, including “All I Could Do Was Cry,” “Trust in Me” and “At Last,” which established her as Chess’s first major female star.

She remained with Chess well into the 1970s, reappearing on the charts after a long absence in 1967 with the funky and high-spirited “Tell Mama.” In the late ’70s and early ’80s she was an opening act for the Rolling Stones.

After decades of touring, recording for various labels and drifting in and out of the public eye, Ms. James found herself in the news in 2009 after Beyoncé Knowles recorded a version of “At Last” closely modeled on hers. (Ms. Knowles played Ms. James in the 2008 movie “Cadillac Records,” a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of Chess.) Ms. Knowles also performed “At Last” at an inaugural ball for President Obama in Washington.

When the movie was released, Ms. James had kind words for Ms. Knowles’s portrayal. But in February 2009, referring specifically to the Washington performance, she told an audience, “I can’t stand Beyoncé,” and threatened to “whip” the younger singer for doing “At Last.” She later said she had been joking, but she did add that she wished she had been invited to sing the song herself for the new president.

Ms. James’s survivors include her husband of 42 years, Artis Mills; two sons, Donto and Sametto James; and four grandchildren.

Though her life had its share of troubles to the end — her husband and sons were locked in a long-running battle over control of her estate, which was resolved in her husband’s favor only weeks before her death — Ms. James said she wanted her music to transcend unhappiness rather than reflect it.

“A lot of people think the blues is depressing,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, “but that’s not the blues I’m singing. When I’m singing blues, I’m singing life. People that can’t stand to listen to the blues, they’ve got to be phonies.”

9702: Black Bankruptcy Bias…?

From The New York Times…

Blacks Face Bias in Bankruptcy, Study Suggests

By Tara Siegel Bernard

Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to wind up in the more onerous and costly form of consumer bankruptcy as they try to dig out from their debts, a new study has found.

The disparity persisted even when the researchers adjusted for income, homeownership, assets and education. The evidence suggested that lawyers were disproportionately steering blacks into a process that was not as good for them financially, in part because of biases, whether conscious or unconscious.

The vast majority of debtors file under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code, which typically allows them to erase most debts in a matter of months. It tends to have a higher success rate and is less expensive than the alternative, Chapter 13, which requires debtors to dedicate their disposable income to paying back their debts for several years.

The study of racial differences in bankruptcy filings was written by Robert M. Lawless, a bankruptcy expert and law professor, and Dov Cohen, a psychology professor, both with the University of Illinois; and Jean Braucher, a law professor at the University of Arizona.

A survey conducted as part of their research found that bankruptcy lawyers were much more likely to steer black debtors into a Chapter 13 than white filers even when they had identical financial situations. The lawyers, the survey found, were also more likely to view blacks as having “good values” when they expressed a preference for Chapter 13.

“Unfortunately I’m not surprised with these results,” said Neil Ellington, executive vice president of Consumer Education Services, a credit counseling agency in Raleigh, N.C. “The same underlying issues that created the problem in mortgage lending, with minorities paying higher interest rates than their white counterparts having the same loan qualifications, are present in all financial fields.”

The findings, which will be published in The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies later this year, did not suggest that there was any obvious evidence of discrimination in the bankruptcy process. “I don’t think there is any overt conspiracy,” Professor Lawless said. “But when you have a complex system, these biases can play out and the people within the system don’t see the pattern because nobody is in charge of looking at these big issues.”

Read the full story here.

9699: Saluting Buffalo Soldiers.

Here’s a comment left at a previous post by Buffalo Soldier 9:

Keep history alive by telling that history.

Read the greatest ‘historical novel’—Rescue at Pine Ridge—the first generation of Buffalo Soldiers. The website is: http://www.rescueatpineridge.com

This is the greatest story of Black Military History…5 stars Amazon Internationally and Barnes & Noble. YouTube commercials are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD66NUKmZPs and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVslyHmDy9A&feature=related

Rescue at Pine Ridge is the story of the rescue of the famed 7th Cavalry by the 9th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers. The 7th Cavalry was entrapped again after the Little Big Horn Massacre, fourteen years later, the day after the Wounded Knee Massacre. If it wasn’t for the 9th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, there would [have] been a second massacre of the 7th Cavalry. This story is about brutality, compassion, reprisal, bravery, heroism, redemption and gallantry.

You’ll enjoy the novel that embodies the Native Americans, Outlaws and African-American/Black soldiers, from the south to the north, in the days of the Native American Wars with the approaching United States of America.

The novel was taken from my mini-series movie with the same title, “RaPR”, to keep the story alive. The movie so far has the interest of Mr. Bill Duke, Hill Harper, Glynn Turman, James Whitmore Jr., Reginald T. Dorsey and a host of other major actors in which we are in talks with, in starring in this epic American story.

When you get a chance, also please visit our Alpha Wolf Productions website at http://www.alphawolfprods.com and see our other productions, like Stagecoach Mary, the first Black Woman to deliver mail for the US Postal System in Montana, in the 1890’s. Spread the word.

Peace.

9690: Buffalo Soldiers Ride On.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Buffalo Soldiers tell their stories

Two Buffalo Soldiers speak at the Autry museum, recalling their experiences as black men in the then-segregated Army. It was one of many L.A.-area events honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

By Ari Bloomekatz, Los Angeles Times

When James Cooper was a teenager in segregated Louisiana, he worked at a factory for $2 a day and didn’t see a bright future.

So he entered the military, attracted by such benefits as free lodging and meals, and eventually joined the ranks of one of the first African American regiments in the U.S. Army, becoming what was known as a Buffalo Soldier.

“Why did I join the Army? Survival. At 17, I looked at the Army and it was better than what I had,” Cooper, now 89, told a small audience Sunday at the Autry National Center of the American West, in one of many events commemorating the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

A program in Culver City featured a panel discussion, poetry, choral and jazz music and a staged reading of a play called “The Dreamers” featuring Margaret Avery, an actress best known for her role in “The Color Purple.” In Exposition Park, the California African American Museum kicked off a two-day program with a celebration called One Dream, a National Influence, a World of People.

At the Autry, Cooper spoke of the need to tell younger people about the Buffalo Soldiers as time rapidly shrinks their ranks.

“I want them to remember what we accomplished as a black people … and that we’re still marching on,” he said.

The first African American regiments in the Army were authorized by an act of Congress in 1866.

Buffalo Soldiers guarded the Western frontier and fought in the Spanish-American War, both world wars and other conflicts. The all-black regiments disbanded in the early 1950s as the military desegregated.

Cooper and fellow Buffalo Soldier Andrew Aaron spoke in front of the Autry museum’s exhibit on Henry O. Flipper, the first African American cadet to graduate from West Point. The two men talked about their experiences fighting in Korea, Japan and Italy, and they wore high blue hats, blue jackets adorned with medals and yellow ties decorated with images of Buffalo Soldiers.

Their audience of about two dozen included children — some squirmy and some eager to take photos. One child asked whether Cooper and Aaron were the first Buffalo Soldiers, to which the 80-year-old Aaron replied: “Weren’t the first, one of the last.”

It is unclear how many Buffalo Soldiers are still alive. Charles L. Davis, who helps organize some of their public appearances, called their story “a treasure that we’re letting fade away.”

“If you don’t keep that bandwagon going,” Davis said, “people will throw dirt over your history.”

9640: Taking On Amazon.com.

From The Los Angeles Times…

Skirmish with Amazon draws new attention to Bay Area bookstore

Marcus Books in San Francisco, the nation’s oldest African American bookstore, has been a center of black intellectual and civic life for half a century.

By Lee Romney, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from San Francisco—Before Jasmine Johnson could walk, her crib was tucked behind the counter of her grandparents’ San Francisco bookstore. By age 6, she was reciting Langston Hughes poems to customers and picking out books for other children. At 12, she marched nervously up to civil rights icon Rosa Parks at a store event to chat.

“At a very young age, we were expected to have opinions, to have veneration for elders and to be well read,” said Johnson, 27, a UC Berkeley doctoral student who is among the third generation to help run Marcus Books, the nation’s oldest African American bookstore.

So it came as no surprise in December when Johnson took a stand on behalf of small businesses nationwide by launching a petition against retail giant Amazon.com.

As part of a holiday shopping promotion, Amazon had offered customers a price break if they used a smart phone app to scan products’ costs in brick-and-mortar stores and then bought them online instead. Although the promotion did not apply to books — Amazon said it was aimed at electronics sold in “major retail chain stores” — it infuriated booksellers long stressed by Internet competition.

“Marcus Books is still here but it’s a struggle,” Johnson wrote in the petition. The price-check app, she continued, “goes beyond simple competition in a free marketplace. It represents an ugly race to the bottom that … will lead to long-term pain for communities in the form of lost jobs and tax revenues.”

More than 11,000 people so far have signed the change.org petition, which asks Amazon to swear off such promotions and apologize.

That may never happen. But Johnson’s efforts have drawn consumers’ attention and provided valuable publicity for the Bay Area institution founded by Julian and Raye Richardson and now run by a clan that includes Johnson’s mother, aunts, uncle, siblings and cousins.

Marcus Books has been at the center of Bay Area black intellectual, political and civic life for more than half a century, the site of Black Panthers meetings as well as the Bay Area’s first Kwanzaa celebration. The San Francisco store and a second outlet that opened in Oakland in 1976 have hosted prominent authors and activists — Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Muhammad Ali among them.

Most of all, the business and its determined overseers have offered sanctuary to generations of African Americans, broadening their view of the world and of themselves.

“To see that many books written by and for black people in one place — I could reach for a children’s book, for science, social science, poets,” said Kenneth Monteiro, dean of San Francisco State University’s College of Ethnic Studies, who discovered the haven while a graduate student at Stanford.

“They were the keepers of the knowledge who would take the book off the shelf and say: ‘You’re having a personal crisis. Read this poetry.’”

Marcus Books also has been a lifeline for prominent black authors such as Ishmael Reed — a link to readers and a source of research. On its shelves, the poet and novelist said, he discovered a book on the son of the first African American U.S. Army general that provided inspiration for his protagonist Chappie Puttbutt in “Japanese by Spring.”

“The kind of work I’m writing has a small audience, and a lot of African American writers are in the same position,” Reed said. “If Marcus Books were to disappear, it would be a great loss to many of us.”

Julian and Raye Richardson opened Marcus Books in San Francisco’s Fillmore District in 1960, not long after the area had been designated as a redevelopment zone. When bulldozers displaced thousands of black residents and businesses, the store — which had been named to honor black nationalist Marcus Garvey — moved as well. But it returned to the street in 1980, setting up in a purple Victorian on the edge of what is now Japan Town.

Julian, who also launched a print shop in 1948 that is still run by the family, died in 2000. Raye, longtime chairwoman of San Francisco State’s black studies department, is 91. She and daughter Blanche Richardson — who runs the Oakland store with her own daughter — live on the Victorian’s second floor. Jasmine’s parents, Karen and Greg Johnson, live on the third. Karen and another of her daughters run the San Francisco store.

In addition to its books, the store houses a smattering of instruments for impromptu jam sessions. Music is in the Victorian’s bones: In the 1950s, before it was lifted off its foundation on nearby Laguna Street, it was home to Jimbo’s Bop City, an after-hours jazz club where John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and other jazz greats played.

One recent afternoon, Karen Johnson greeted customers in a low, steady voice, engaging them as her mother had done. As she fixed the slightly startled teenage daughter of one customer in her gaze, the questions tumbled out. Do you go to school? What subject do you love? Maybe we’ll carry your book here one day.

She raised her four daughters in much the same way she was brought up, turning the store into their day-care center and its visiting luminaries into teachers. “We were under an umbrella of love and wisdom, which was just preparation for everything,” Johnson, 63, said of her youth.

She recalled that as a teenager, she had come home from school one day to find Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton sitting in the store, looking handsome.

Among her favorite visiting speakers was singer Barry White. He got out of his limousine in front of the Oakland store, she said, and headed inside. “He had this walk, I call it the black man elephant walk, where the head swings slowly,” she recalled. White lumbered in and then proclaimed in his distinctive voice: “This is nice.”

Despite its notoriety, the store has weathered financial hardship. Marcus Books narrowly escaped foreclosure two years ago thanks to community support and fundraising, but still it struggles to stay out of the red.

Johnson is getting her doctorate in African diaspora studies, with the goal of better serving the family business. While spending the last semester as a visiting scholar at Princeton, she has worked from afar to increase the store’s online presence through a Facebook page. Meanwhile, a family friend has produced videos of store readings that will soon be posted on YouTube.

The petition also spurred support.

First-time customers have been drawn by news of Johnson’s efforts: One woman drove two hours to do her Christmas shopping at Marcus Books.

“That’s really the goal of the campaign,” Johnson said, “hoping … that people are thinking about the future of communities and not just the cheapest deal.”

It is a hope many share.

Ezekiel McCarter, who moved to San Francisco from Texas a year ago, said he had passed the store daily before walking in a few months ago and forging an instant bond with Karen Johnson. Now he drops by daily.

If he’s feeling down, the 19-year-old said, Johnson will pick out a book that makes him think.

“As soon as I came in here, I felt at home,” he said. “People say you go to college to network. Well this is like a college. This is home base for everyone.”